It's The Democracy, Stupid
It isn't American aid that makes the difference in Muslim countries, writes Thomas Friedman:

I believe the tensions between America and the Muslim world stem primarily from the conditions under which many Muslims live, not what America does. I believe free people, living under freely elected governments, with a free press and with economies and education systems that enable their young people to achieve their full potential, don't spend a lot of time thinking about whom to hate, whom to blame, and whom to lash out at. Free countries don't have leaders who use their media and state-owned "intellectuals" to deflect all of their people's anger away from them and onto America.

Ah, you say, but the Europeans live in free-market democracies and they have become very anti-American. Yes, some of them. But for Europeans, anti-Americanism is a hobby. For too many in the Muslim world it has become a career.

I am sure that young people in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Poland and India have their views on America, but they are not an obsession. They want Americans' jobs, not Americans' lives. They live in societies that empower their young people to realize their full potential and to express any opinion - pro-American, anti-American or neutral.

So I don't want young Muslims to like America. I want them to like and respect themselves, their own countries and their own governments. I want them to have the same luxury to ignore America as Taiwan's young people have - because they are too busy focusing on improving their own lives and governance, running for office, studying anything they want or finding good jobs in their own countries.

The Bush team is certainly not fostering all this when it mismanages a war it began in order to liberate the people of Iraq. Its performance has been pathetic, and I understand anyone on the right or the left who wants to wash his hands of the whole thing. Speaking personally, though, I am still hoping that these Iraqi elections come off - out of respect for the Iraqis who have been ready to risk their lives for a chance to vote, out of contempt for the insurgents who want to prevent that and out of a deep conviction that something very important is at stake.

No, these elections won't change Iraq or the region overnight, and Thomas Jefferson is not on the ballot. But they will at least kick off what the Iraq expert Yitzhak Nakash calls "a real, Iraqi political process run by and for Iraqis."